There is an exciting expo happening next week. It’s the Cloud Expo Europe 2009, in London and it’s FREE if you pre-register.

Now we’ve all heard of the term cloud (in the computing sense), but I suspect many don’t really know what it involves. So this is your chance to find out.

As with many conferences there will be stands for companies and projects related to the event. There will also be talks from field pioneers and other contributors- in both business tracks and a technical track.

I’ve been invited to talk about Cloud offerings regarding Ubuntu, and will be talking about Eucalyptus (no, not the plant), the Cloud suite that is the next big thing. This replicates the Amazon EC2 and other offerings in a free and open source software.

Also, the Ubuntu community have been offered a stand. If you want to help man this, it would be appreciated! Let me know if you are available.

Looking forward to seeing you there.

For more information:
http://www.cloudexpoeurope.com/

May 17th, 2009 | All, Blogroll, hantslug, lugradio, ubuntu, ubuntu-uk | 1 comment

Chris Dakin is possibly one of the more unlikely candidates i’d imagine to be doing a mammoth push bike ride from London to Paris.

This chap isn’t someone i’ve seen to be especially athletic nor a ’spring chicken’ (i’m sure he’ll love me for saying that) -- which makes him quite unlikely to choose to ride 234 miles in 3 days. Even if someone is a keen rider, this is still quite a distance to cover in such a short time.

So why would he choose to do this?
We’ll he’s doing it to raise money for a rather special charity called “Big Issue”. Now this charity is a little bit different to some of the ‘traditional’ charities. They help people who are less fortunate, often homeless people by allowing them to sell, what many consider, to be a quality magazine, and these people earn from the proceeds.

He made a video which shows him training (hopefully you can see it below):

As I said, he’s rather unlikely to elect to do this, but he has been training hard. He’s done somewhere in the region of 700 miles since Christmas, around 90 miles per week. This training is gradually rising to 200 miles per week, as he gets nearer the event.

The worrying thing is, unless he can raise £1300 by May 23rd (10 days away!) -- he can’t take part. This would be such a shame, as he’s put in so much effort to date and it would be an awful for the charity to miss out.

So, I wouldn’t normally ask -- but please consider donating -- even if it’s just a small amount, to help him take part, and complete his personal challenge!

Find out more, and sponsor online (paypal supported) via:
http://www.justgiving.com/chrisdakin

I’m sure a “during” video would make your donation worthwhile!

May 13th, 2009 | All, Blogroll, hantslug, ubuntu-uk | No comments